Richard Weaver

Weclome to mere rhetoric, a podcast for beginners and insiders
about the ideas, terms and movement who have shaped rhetorical
history. I’m Mary Hedengren and today we’re talking about two
influencial chapters from one book: Richard Weavers’ “The Ethics of
Rhetoric”

The Ethics of rhetoric was written in 1953, and it definitely
feels like it and Weaver was Southern and definitely feels like it.
Even though he spent most of his career at the University of
Chicago, with Wayne Booth, he kept his summers free to go down to a
farm that he kept where he lived an agrarian dream of plowing the
family vegetable garden with a mule. He definitely believed in the
Jeffersonian ideal of the gentleman farmer, connected to the
earth.

Somehow in the middle of all that plowing, Weaver was able to be
one of the most important of the “new conservative” branch of
thinkers and the leading neo-platonist rhetorician of the 20th
century. Weaver believed also somewhat idealistically about
rhetoric. He said, “Rhetoric “instills belief and action” through
“intersect[ing] possibility with the plan of actuality and hences
of the imperative” (28). Rhetoric is “a process of coordination and
subordination […] very close to the essential thought process”
(210). Thought and rhetoric were interwoven and rhetoric couldn’t
be ignored.

There are two chapters in The Ethics of Rhetoric which
have had especially lasting influence. The first is a reading of
Phaedrus, because Weaver loved him some Plato. Remember when we
talked about the Phaedrus? For those of you who weren’t here, it’s
a story about Plato giving two opposite speeches about love: in the
first, he tweaks an existing speech about the importance of
choosing someone who doesn’t love you as your lover, in the second,
he repents of the first and gives a speech about how it is good to
have a lover who loves you, and at the end, he ends up talking
about rhetoric. Some people may say, “what? what’s the connection?”
Not Weaver. Weaver says tthat“beginning with something simple”
Plato’s dialogue “pass to more general levels of application” and
then end up in allegory (4). The lovers are like rhetoric—you can
have good, bad and impotent rhetoric. The non-lover is a lie, like
“semantically purified speech” (7). Bad rhetoric, like bad lover,
seeks to keep recipient weak and passive (11). If we have impure
motives towards our audience, we’ll keep them dependent on us, week
and passive, instead of empowering them the way that a true lover
would. Ulitmately, Weaver believed in an ideal of rhetoric,
rhetoric that would make people "better versions of themselves"
(Young 135)

Another one of Weavers’ chapters to have lasting influence
classifies the very words we use, most famously, “god terms” and
“devil terms.” “God terms are those words that, for a specific
audience, are so positive and influential that they can overpower a
lot of other language or ideas. For Weaver, writing in 1953, he
uses “American” as one fo the key political god terms. In contrast
to god terms are devil termns and for weaver, writing in 1953, the
ultimate devil term is “communist.’ From here, he can set up the
language of the McCarthy era nicely, right? The committee on
Unamerican activities uses a powerful god term. Most famously,
Weaver introduces “god-terms” and “devil-terms” as ultimate terms
that are either “imoart to the other [terms] their lesser degree of
force and fixes the scale by which degrees of comparison are
understood” (212), either positively or negatively (222). When you
hear a god or devil term, the defensive rhetorician must “"hold a
dialectic with himself" to see if he buys the word as it’s being
used.

But additionally Charismatic terms= those terms who have “broken
loose [from] referential connetions” which will that “they
shall mean something” (eg: “freedom”) (227-8). These terms
don’t mean something in particular just “happy feeling.”While,
Uncontested term= seems to invite a contest, but not in its context
(eg: appealing to “illustrious Rome”) (166). They aren’t really
disputed with. Ultimate terms like these are often “a single term
[awaits] coupling with another term” (211).

Weaver was also influencial in the rhetoric of poetics because
he saw that “Like poetry, rhetoric relies on the connotation of
words as well as their denotation.” That is
to say, not just what the words mean in the dictionary, but what
they mean to a community—communist to a group of 1953 american
politicians is a far more fearful thing than its dictionary
definition. Like poetry, too, there must be an enthemyme, a
truncated syllogism, where the audience fills in the blanks, or as
Weaver puts it “The missing propsition […] ‘in their hearts’”
(174)

Good rhetoricians, he claimed, use poetic analogies to relate
abstract
ideas directly to the listeners (Young 132). Specifically focusing
on metaphor,
he found that comparison should be an essential part of the
rhetorical process (Johannesen 23).

Weaver didn’t produce more than a handful of books, possibly
also because he died quite suddenly in his fifties, but he had a
lasting influence in the Chicago school and elsewhere. Weaver
certainly wasn’t a perfect person—for instance, he disliked jazz
and that is just plain wrong—and he’s kind of gone out of favor,
but reading The Ethics of Rhetoric, you see how crucial
his ideas have been to the 20th century revival of rhetoric.

About the Podcast

A podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, ideas and movements that have defined the history of rhetoric.